Red on a Green Ghost
by YellowTangerines
Summary: A young man sat in his living room. It just so happened that on that night, the 15th of August, 2009, this young man experienced what could be called a normal summer night. Homestuck crossover AU with Kagerou Project, no Sburb, no trolls. Spoilers for Kagerou Project! /Story 1 of Mekakustuck/
1. Newspiece

**Red on a Green Ghost**

 _Father and son killed in cold blood last night_ , read the headline. Though Rose, Dave and Jade were all miles apart, they saw the same words on their screens. There stood the same profile of a buck-toothed, blue-eyed boy, recreated in millions of little pixels and likely covered in sticky blood.

John's chumhandle was greyed out when the three last saw it in Pesterchum. Now, as far as his friends knew, it would stay that way forever.

* * *

Rose found the headline to be an absolute sucker punch, a shatter of fantasy back into reality.

She was leaning against the wall that afternoon, a thick book resting open against her knees. It was a time of calm for the heroes in that story, a calm that seeped into Rose's mind and locked her into a deep flow. Turned pages gently guided the tranquility, shielding Rose from any sense of her true surroundings.

That was, until her mother knocked on the door. Mom's fist rapped against the wood with both speed and lethargy, as possible as that was for a human being. Her lips let loose Rose's name in a slurred pile of hiccups and god-knows-what, repeating itself in inebriated cycles. Rose huffed, hopping off her mattress seat and turning her room's doorknob. There stood her mom, slouched with a martini in one hand and a PDA in the other.

"r-Roze look ta thsi…this. Hic!" Mom drawled. A shaky arm extended the PDA towards Rose, dropping it into her right palm. Rose lifted her eyes in a glare for a second, then let them fall to the screen on the phone. _Father and son killed in cold blood last night._ A slideshow with John and his dad's images fading into one another. All of it happened while they were watching a movie, late night on August 15, there were no bodies found…The young Lalonde found herself just as shaky as the woman who showed her the news. Why? How did it happen? She wanted to know.

Such was the reaction of one Rose Lalonde, to the happenings of what may have been a normal summer night.

* * *

Dave was crushed by the headline just as Rose was, though his upbringing prompted him to swallow the blow.

Complete Bullshit truly was the pinnacle of stupid when it came to browsers. Dave was aiming for the IMDB page in slick black, but with a jerk of his arm his cursor was on CNN's neon eyesore yellow. He cursed beneath his breath, about to close the tab as soon as it loaded with its unimportant news stories and black banner, but he didn't. Up in the left corner of the webpage, Dave saw someone he knew.

John looked exactly the way Dave imagined him to be, buck teeth and glasses and all. It was the picture of a boy dead at age 13, as the coolkid knew when he read the headline. Lived with his dad in Maple Valley, watched movies – there was no mistaking it. This was ghostyTrickster, John Egbert, Dave's best bro. And he had been stabbed full of holes until he died. House security cameras didn't lie about this kind of thing.

Dave did well hiding his reaction. If Lil Cal or Bro ever passed by his computer, neither of them saw anything wrong nor any sad news pieces sitting around on a screen.

And so for many nights on end that year, a particular Dave Strider wondered if he could have been quick enough and saved anyone on a normal summer night.

* * *

Jade was the last to know what happened, and as such was hit with not one but two emotional blows.

Her lunchtop had been malfunctioning for a myriad of reasons. Jade had done all she could have to fix the computer, grandpa not required, so it simply had to rest for a couple of days. In the meantime, Jade took this opportunity to mess about her island in exploration, completely oblivious to the events that August 15. She camped for days in the ruins, the jungles, smiling while her best friends were mourning. Finally when she returned to her tower, 5 days had already passed since the time the news article was released.

The first thing Jade did was check Pesterchum. It was odd that John didn't return her messages about her lunchtop not working and that she was going to take the time to camp, especially since Rose and Dave did. Seeing as there wasn't anything said to her otherwise, the gardener then went to close her Pesterchum, mark herself idle until…wait a second. Someone did message her while she was gone. Rose had sent her a link to what Jade assumed was a news site, with an article detailing a murder and the ones killed.

It explained everything, the article did – it explained very well why John was so idle all of a sudden. Jade's head buzzed with so many questions why, why that Jack Noir would want to kill anyone as nice as her online friend and his father, and why she didn't check back earlier. _The lunchtop didn't need that much time to cool down_ , Jade thought. _Why couldn't I have come back?_ rang amidst ideas of _I was having fun while something horrible happened_ and many other things.

These thoughts never ceased. They would always return to the mind of a certain Jade Harley, again and again, of just what had happened on a normal summer night.


	2. Pesterlog

_August 21_ _st_ _, 2009/A nondescript hospital_

GT: rose?  
GT: are you there?  
GT: huh, you must be asleep.

TT: John?

GT: there you are, rose!

TT: John, is it really you?

GT: yes it is!  
GT: who else?

TT: I thought you were dead.

GT: of course i am alive rose.

TT: This is not the time for joking around, John.  
TT: I saw the news. You were dead.  
TT: Where are you right now? In the hospital?

GT: yes.

TT: What happened?

GT: i remember watching a movie with my dad.

TT: Go on.

GT: then i thought i saw somebody with a knife.  
GT: he walked towards us and theeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

TT: John? Are you all right?  
TT: John?

The PDA slid onto the floor with a clatter.

John's nurse strode by his room, noticing the patient inside staring off into space. As she went closer to examine the boy, opening her mouth to start the typical conversation, only a little gasp came out.

Kids were not born with eyes red like exit signs. Kids did not naturally have narrow pupils like snakes.

* * *

 _AN:_ _There is one chapter remaining for this story! It hasn't been uploaded though - I wasn't sure if there would be an audience. I guess I'll add it now? ~YellowTangerines_


	3. Projection

John thought he'd been daydreaming. He jerked his head back and forth, then opened his eyes.

This was not the sterile hospital room with its white walls and golden lights. There was no PDA or blanket or bed. The only remnant of the hospital was its pale green robe, out of place in the postered world of John's room and the suburb framed in the window. Confusion was perfectly in place, however.

John took a few steps forward, looking around at the strange familiarity of the cyan sky and the ghosty sheets. The magic chest, the drawer, the movie posters, the closet, the computer, the kid at the computer – everything was here in perfect detail, with not a single thing away from where John remembered it. The kid at the computer?

Indeed there was someone sitting in the chair facing the screen. John shifted his weight a bit to the right, so to see a young boy with a black cowlick typing away at his (their?) keyboard. The boy swiveled around in his chair, revealing an exact copy down to the glasses.

He froze on the spot. Though one was taller and quite obviously not eight years old, the open-mouthed confusion on the two faces were perfectly alike. Without a word able to come out of either mouth, both Johns scanned the doppelganger before them for the tiniest difference, the smallest divergence that wasn't owed to age, but nothing. Staring into the younger trickster's eyes, the older John caught the clear blue he was so used to seeing in the mirror. But when he shifted his gaze to the computer screen?

The irises he was sported were a bright crimson.

* * *

 _If you know when everything went wrong, go back and change it_.

Standing at the edge of another complete reset, Marry released her first new snake into the Heat Haze. She gave no thought to the idea of allowing rememberance of timelines – it was impossible to create that which had already been created elsewhere – but perhaps with some other power a happy ending could be achieved. Projecting Eyes, Marry called this one. _The ability to change what has happened before one's eyes_.

Now, what next? The power to be fast enough? To make everyone listen even when distractions get in the way? To talk directly to snakes?

This could be the start of a new Route 1.

 **End**

* * *

 _AN: Now here's a proper endnote!  
_ _I'm honestly dying right now. This website's formatting thingies and story publishing mechanisms are...new to me. Very new to me. But I'm learning! I think!  
Anyways, thank you for reading all the way to the end of _Red on a Green Ghost _! Comments and criticism will be much appreciated. ~YellowTangerines_


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